Climate Change Is Scaring Kids. Here’s How To Talk To Them.

New York Times - Laura M. Holson

Children held signs as they stood onstage with Gov. Jay Inslee of Washington, who signed bills addressing climate change last month. Credit Elaine Thompson/Associated Press

Hollywood has produced quite a few fictionalized depictions of dramatic climate change. Scores of people die after Manhattan freezes in 2004’s “The Day After Tomorrow.” In “Geostorm,” released in 2017, the weather goes haywire after satellites malfunction.
Realistic scenarios, though, have been less frequent. Yet Sunday’s episode of “Big Little Lies,” the HBO show about five women living in Monterey, Calif., included a second grader who had an anxiety attack after discussing climate change with a teacher. The girl worried the world was going to end.
Psychologists say the way parents and teachers talk about climate change with children has an effect on their young psyches.
“A lot of people, when they talk to kids, are processing their own anxiety and fears,” said John Fraser, a psychologist and chief executive of NewKnowledge, a social science think tank that studies health and the environment. “Do you think kids won’t be scared, too? As a culture, we haven’t developed good tools to talk about these things.”
Janet K. Swim, a professor of psychology at Penn State University, said she emphasized several steps for parents (and teachers, for that matter) to take when talking about climate change with youngsters.
“You should start off with something positive, like, ‘We like the planet,’” she said. This should be followed with taking children outside to appreciate nature. For city dwellers, this is as simple as going to a park. Families in more rural areas can hike.
“The goal is for them to appreciate the beauty of nature,” Dr. Swim said. “They should be thinking about what is good in the environment.”
This serves a purpose: connecting children to a world larger than their own.
“There is this thinking that young kids will understand what we are talking about,” Dr. Fraser said. “But summer and fall are new. They are only beginning to understand the seasons. Nature, to them, is a tree.”

Laura Dern and Jeffrey Nordling in “Big Little Lies,” a show created by David E. Kelley on HBO. In a recent episode, a second grader has an anxiety attack after discussing climate change with a teacher. Credit Jennifer Clasen/HBO

Dr. Swim and Dr. Fraser agree that the next step is discussing the process of climate change and its effect on the planet. This is essential to demystifying the concept of global warming. But it requires parents to do some homework, too. Many parents, educators say, have as much to learn as their children.
“They have to understand the cycle,” Dr. Swim said. “If you want to talk without scaring your kids, you have to understand what is going on.”
At the New England Aquarium in Boston, William Spitzer, the vice president in learning and community, said educators there often engage families by using animals as a starting point. Myrtle, an 80-year-old green sea turtle that weighs 500 pounds, is quite popular among visitors.
One way to explain climate change, he said, is to use the analogy of the Earth being covered by a blanket of heat caused by, among other things, burning fossil fuels. That action creates more carbon dioxide, he said, which “causes the temperature of the ocean to rise.”
For sea turtles like Myrtle, temperature affects gender. “Changes to the environment affect the male-to-female ratio,” he said.
If children can understand how climate change affects an animal like Myrtle, they are more apt to expand their attitudes about the environment, Mr. Spitzer said. “We always try to connect the story back to something people already care about.”
In some situations, though, parents deny that climate change exists. In those cases, Dr. Fraser said, conversations are tricky. “The kids will have two conflicting views of what is going on in the world,” he said.
Educators at the aquarium do not try to change the minds of visitors who resist the concept, Mr. Spitzer said. “But there are not as many deniers as you might think given the noise they make,” he said. “People who go to zoos and museums and aquariums are more open.”
So what can a parent or teacher do to assuage fears? Dr. Fraser suggested that engaging children in social activities, like community gardens or a school recycling program, can give them agency over their future.
“It’s not just what an individual can do,” he said. “We have to look at what we can do as a community.”
Added Dr. Swim: “You don’t just sit down once and talk about it. It is an ongoing conversation.”
Advocates and other environmental professionals are already seeing a shift in attitudes. Community is key to addressing fear, said Meghan Kallman, a sociologist and co-founder of Conceivable Future, an organization that highlights how climate change is limiting reproductive choices.
“We are now only beginning to talk about climate anxiety,” she said. “It used to be fringe-y.”
Ms. Kallman said she has observed children asking parents what they plan to do about climate change.
“And parents should have an answer for that,” she said.

Links

• Unless we act now- The impact of climate change on children
• Climate Change Mainly Impacting Vulnerable Children 
• Future under threat: climate change and children's health
• Children, Young People and Climate Change
• Climate change: The effects on children
• Children and Climate Change: Introducing the Issue

Planting A Trillion Trees May Be The Best Way To Fight Climate Change, Study Says

TIME - Seth Borenstein / AP


The Debates Showed America Still Doesn't Know How to Talk About Climate Change

(WASHINGTON) — The most effective way to fight global warming is to plant lots of trees, a study says. A trillion of them, maybe more.
And there’s enough room, Swiss scientists say. Even with existing cities and farmland, there’s enough space for new trees to cover 3.5 million square miles (9 million square kilometers), they reported in Thursday’s journal Science. That area is roughly the size of the United States.
The study calculated that over the decades, those new trees could suck up nearly 830 billion tons (750 billion metric tons) of heat-trapping carbon dioxide from the atmosphere. That’s about as much carbon pollution as humans have spewed in the past 25 years. Much of that benefit will come quickly because trees remove more carbon from the air when they are younger, the study authors said. The potential for removing the most carbon is in the tropics.
“This is by far — by thousands of times — the cheapest climate change solution” and the most effective, said study co-author Thomas Crowther, a climate change ecologist at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Zurich.
Six nations with the most room for new trees are Russia, the United States, Canada, Australia, Brazil and China.
Before his research, Crowther figured that there were other more effective ways to fight climate change besides cutting emissions, such as people switching from meat-eating to vegetarianism. But, he said, tree planting is far more effective because trees take so much carbon dioxide out of the air.
Thomas Lovejoy, a George Mason University conservation biologist who wasn’t part of the study, called it “a good news story” because planting trees would also help stem the loss of biodiversity. Planting trees is not a substitute for weaning the world off burning oil, coal and gas, the chief cause of global warming, Crowther emphasized. “None of this works without emissions cuts,” he said.
Nor is it easy or realistic to think the world will suddenly go on a tree-planting binge, although many groups have started, Crowther said. “It’s certainly a monumental challenge, which is exactly the scale of the problem of climate change,” he said. And as the Earth warms, and especially as the tropics dry, tree cover is being lost, he noted.
The researchers used Google Earth to see what areas could support more trees, while leaving room for people and crops. Lead author Jean-Francois Bastin estimated there’s space for at least 1 trillion more trees, but it could be 1.5 trillion.
That’s on top of the 3 trillion trees that now are on Earth, according to earlier Crowther research.
The study’s calculations make sense, said Stanford University environmental scientist Chris Field, who wasn’t part of the study. “But the question of whether it is actually feasible to restore this much forest is much more difficult,” Field said in an email.

Links

• Can planting billions of trees save the planet?
• Let nature heal climate and biodiversity crises, say campaigners
• Avoiding meat and dairy is ‘single biggest way’ to reduce your impact on Earth
• The global tree restoration potential
• Crowther Lab
• Global Carbon Budget
• Global Carbon Budget 2018
• 'Football pitch' of Amazon forest lost every minute
• Tropical tree loss persists at high levels
• Climate change made heat five times more likely
• 'Brutal news': global carbon emissions jump to all-time high in 2018
• We have 12 years to limit climate change catastrophe, warns UN
• Paris climate deal: nearly 200 nations sign in end of fossil fuel era
• Climate Change: Trees 'Most Effective Solution' For Warming
• Climate Change Could Be Paused By Planting Trees, Researchers Say, As They Map Out Available Land
• Restoring forests as a means to many ends
• Australia - 20 Million Trees Program
• Fact check: Is Queensland clearing land as fast as Brazil?
• One million species at risk of extinction, UN report warns, and we are mostly to blame
• Threatened blue carbon ecosystems store carbon 40 times faster than forests

Stop Building A Spaceship To Mars And Just Plant Some Damn Trees

Mother Jones - Jackie Flynn Mogensen

Researchers found that there’s room for an extra 900 million hectares of canopy cover.

borchee/Getty

When it comes to climate change research, most studies bear bad news regarding the looming, very real threat of a warming planet and the resulting devastation that it will bring upon the Earth. But a new study, out Thursday in the journal Science, offers a sliver of hope for the world: A group of researchers based in Switzerland, Italy, and France found that expanding forests, which sequester carbon dioxide from the atmosphere, could seriously make up for humans’ toxic carbon emissions.
In 2018, the United Nations’ Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, the world’s foremost authority on climate, estimated that we’d need to plant 1 billion hectares of forest by 2050 to keep the globe from warming a full 1.5 degrees Celsius over pre-industrial levels. (One hectare is about twice the size of a football field.) Not only is that “undoubtedly achievable,” according to the study’s authors, but global tree restoration is “our most effective climate change solution to date.”
In fact, there’s space on the planet for an extra 900 million hectares of canopy cover, the researchers found, which translates to storage for a whopping 205 gigatonnes of carbon. To put that in perspective, humans emit about 10 gigatonnes of carbon from burning fossil fuels every year, according to Richard Houghton, a senior scientist at the Woods Hole Research Center, who was not involved with the study. And overall, there are now about 850 gigatonnes of carbon in the atmosphere; a tree-planting effort on that scale could, in theory, cut carbon by about 25 percent, according to the authors.
In addition to that, Houghton says, trees are relatively cheap carbon consumers. As he put it, “There are technologies people are working on to take carbon dioxide out of the air. And trees do it—for nothing.”
To make this bold prediction, the researchers identified what tree cover looks like in nearly 80,000 half-hectare plots in existing forests. They then used that data to map how much canopy cover would be possible in other regions—excluding urban or agricultural land—depending on the area’s topography, climate, precipitation levels, and other environmental variables. The result revealed where trees might grow outside of existing forests.
“We know a single tree can capture a lot of carbon. What we don’t know is how many trees the planet can support,” says Jean-François Bastin, an ecologist and postdoc at ETH-Zürich, a university in Zürich, Switzerland, and the study’s lead author, adding, “This gives us an idea.”

The global potential tree cover available for restoration. Science

They found that all that tree-planting potential isn’t spaced evenly across the globe. Six countries, in fact, hold more than half of the world’s area for potential tree restoration (in this order): Russia, the United States, Canada, Australia, Brazil, and China. The United States alone has room for more than 100 million hectares of additional tree cover—greater than the size of Texas.
The study, however, has its limitations. For one, a global tree-planting effort is somewhat impractical. As the authors write, “it remains unclear what proportion of this land is public or privately owned, and so we cannot identify how much land is truly available for restoration.” Rob Jackson, who chairs the Earth System Science Department and Global Carbon Project at Stanford University and was not involved with the study, agrees that forest management plays an important role in the fight against climate change, but says the paper’s finding that humans could reduce atmospheric carbon by 25 percent by planting trees seemed “unrealistic,” and wondered what kinds of trees would be most effective or how forest restoration may disrupt agriculture.
“Forests and soils are the cheapest and fastest way to remove carbon from the atmosphere—lots of really good opportunities there,” he said. “I get uneasy when we start talking about managing billions of extra acres of land, with one goal in mind: to store carbon.” Bastin, though, says the study is “about respecting the natural ecosystem,” and not simply planting “100 percent tree cover.” He also clarified that planting trees alone cannot fix climate change. The problem is “related to the way we are living on the planet,” he says.
Caveats aside, Houghton sees the study as a useful exercise in what’s possible. “[The study] is setting the limits,” says Houghton. “It’s not telling us at all how to implement it. That’s what our leaders have to think about.”

Links

• Climate Change Could Be Paused By Planting Trees, Researchers Say, As They Map Out Available Land
• Climate Change: Trees 'Most Effective Solution' For Warming
• Tree Planting 'Has Mind-Blowing Potential' To Tackle Climate Crisis
• Australia Will Plant 1 Billion Trees To Combat Climate Change
• Massive Restoration Of World’s Forests Would Cancel Out A Decade Of CO2 Emissions, Analysis Suggests
• Planting 1.2 Trillion Trees Could Cancel Out A Decade of CO2 Emissions, Scientists Find
• Scientists Champion Forests As 'Unsung Hero' Of Climate Action
• Land Conservation Steps Into Limelight As Key Climate Change Fix
• When Trees Make Rain: Could Restoring Forests Help Ease Drought In Australia?

A New Team Is Working To Predict The Danger Zones Of Australia's Deadliest Heatwaves

ABC News - Helen Frost

Recognition of the impact of extreme heat is prompting stronger responses. (ABC News: Mary Lloyd)

Key points: A new team will take a national approach and aims to predict heatwaves across Australia It comes as nine of the past 14 years have been among the hottest on record The Bureau of Meteorology is warning the record temperature trend is set to continue

It has been 10 years since Victoria's Black Saturday fires killed 173 people — the worst bushfires in Australia's history.
While the fires made headlines, the associated heatwave claimed another 374 lives in Victoria and another 50 in South Australia.
Now, a working group under the guidance of the Bureau of Meteorology (BOM) is developing a strategy to better predict that natural phenomenon.
Nine of the past 14 years have been among the hottest on record and 2018 was the third warmest in Australia's history.
In response to the danger posed by extreme heat, the Federal Government has formed the Emergency Management Australia-led National Heatwave Framework Working Group, with input from a range of departments.
John Nairn, the state manager of the BOM in South Australia, said the heat trend was set to continue.
"We are seeing heatwaves becoming much more intense," he said.

"One of the signals that we have to be mindful of though is that the minimum temperature is probably even more important than the maximum temperature.

"If we can't get recovery temperatures to actually discharge the heat, those very high temperatures, day-on-day, continue to build heat in the environment and the heatwaves become much more intense as a consequence.
"That is where we see the impacts unfold."
Right now, Europe is experiencing a heatwave which, according to the World Meteorological Organisation, is exceptionally intense.

A girl cools off in a Paris fountain during the recent heatwave. (AP: Alessandra Tarantino)

France set a new national record of 45.9 degrees Celsius and records have also been broken in Germany, Poland, the Czech Republic and Austria.
Closer to home, Adelaide hit a sweltering 46.6C on January 24 this year, surpassing the previous record set in Melbourne a decade ago to officially become the hottest capital in the country.

It's not just the elderly who are at risk
The national working group will use data from the Australian Bureau of Statistics, Geoscience Australia, the Department of Health and the Australian Institute of Health and Welfare.

"We'll have a lot of the ingredients for how people can become exposed and the evidence of their exposure vulnerabilities," Mr Nairn said.

"We can hopefully identify the locations and the types of people who may well be exposed to those heatwaves."

The bureau currently issues heatwave charts, but is working on a predictability map. (Supplied: BOM)

According to Mr Nairn, the evidence that extreme heatwaves were increasing — and appearing very early and late in the season — was reflected in BOM's data.
"The BOM is leading a project that will build a heatwave predictability map for Australia," he said.
"That will enable us to combine that with our heatwave intensity measure that we do with our forecasting to determine where we think the community will be exposed and possible impacts."
The map should be able to predict how long and severe the heatwaves will be, allowing emergency, health and community services to put measures in place and deploy staff to cope with the heat.

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The information would also go out to government departments, so they can plan for the excess power consumption during prolonged periods of heat, to help avoid blackouts.
But the planning side of things is only part of the battle — another problem with heatwaves is that people can underestimate the risks.
Research undertaken by University of Adelaide public health expert Peng Bi showed that most people believed a heatwave was something that would not impact them.
"A lot of people think 'OK a heatwave, hot days in summer are not unusual, that is a normal phenomenon' — but in fact it is not. I think that is a very dangerous perception," Professor Bi said.

"From our study we found that the elderly, outdoor workers and migrant communities are the most vulnerable populations in our community, so we need to do something for them."

The elderly make up a large number of the deaths during extreme heat, but the figures also took into consideration ambulance call-outs, hospital presentations, drownings and the consequences for people with chronic health issues such as cardiovascular disease.
In addition to that, they also include festival and alcohol-related deaths.

A large crowd at Groovin' the Moo festival. (ABC Central Victoria: Corey Hague)

"[On] hot days, a lot of people drink alcohol, they are wandering around the streets and alcohol-driven street violence sometimes happens," Professor Bi said.

"At a large event, that's why we see an increased police presence on really hot days."

State borders determine heatwave responses
Each state and territory has its own heatwave response approach, with different triggers and thresholds for their local communities.
They also have different government agencies responsible for warning systems and plans.
In South Australia for example, the State Emergency Service (SES) takes the lead.
"South Australia has a whole-of-government heatwave planning framework," SES chief officer Chris Beattie said.
"Once we are aware some extreme heat conditions are forecast, we will activate cross-government heatwave warning protocols and arrangements.

"Within each department there are a range of specific triggers which will be activated."

The SES take the lead in South Australia. (ABC News: Gordon Taylor)

 There are different state and federal projects looking at how to better respond to heatwaves, and fix holes in the current system.
For instance, South Australian heatwaves are currently mapped using Adelaide temperatures for the whole state.
The SES is also working with other agencies and academics to develop a new modelling technique that will allow it to adapt its response.
The team hopes to have it set up in time for the hot and dry weather already predicted this summer.
"We are now working with the University of Adelaide and the BOM to provide a gridded data set that can provide a data-rich source of information at the township level," Mr Beattie said.
"So, in terms of providing information and warnings to the broader community, we can move beyond a whole-of-state heatwave warning threshold to individual tailored thresholds for communities."

Working out the death toll is not easy
One of the main issues in addressing heat problems in Australia is the inconsistent way death tolls have been calculated and reported.
Different agencies cite different figures, and it is often unclear which is the most accurate.
For example, following South Australia's two-week heatwave in 2009, there were three different figures.
SA Health stated there were 33 deaths, the coroner's office said there had been 58 and PricewaterhouseCoopers (PWC) put the figure at 96.

An ice delivery man cools off in SA's far north, the day Adelaide's temperature hit 46.6C. (ABC News)

Mr Beattie explained that those different approaches were one of the biggest challenges facing authorities as they tried to prepare and plan for heatwaves across the country.
"Actually capturing that data and cleaning it and understanding it is a complex process," he said.

"Depending on which methodology you use, you'll get a different result as to how many fatalities there have been for any given event.

"It's not just the direct heat deaths that we need to be worried about, it's the coincidental deaths that occur — from illnesses that are exacerbated, from increased accident rates in the workplace and our roads and through other events such as drownings."
The BOM has already issued its outlook for spring which has forecast more hot and dry weather.
The weather pattern is indicating below-average rainfall through central and eastern Australia, which covers around two thirds of the continent.

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Heatwaves kill far more people than other natural disasters. ABC Emergency has a checklist of things you can do to be ready. 

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John Nairn said the BOM was getting better at providing heatwave advice to communities.
"Last year we were preparing the community for a hotter summer and an earlier start and I suppose those chickens came home to roost when Queensland's epic fires started in October, and the heatwave hit the wet tropical coast in early November," he said.

"Those messages were accurate, so we're building confidence that the bureau can provide good advice.

"Certainly the dialogue that we have with the emergency services agencies and the departments of health and the like are becoming more meaningful over time, so we are helping the community prepare."
The new working group has one year to develop the predictability map and understand the data types required.
"It would be nice to think we will have something in place by the end of the year," Mr Nairn said.
"But there are many agencies coming together for this, for the first time, to look at each other's data.
"It's not a trivial exercise."

Links

• Heatwaves are Australia's deadliest natural hazard and many are unprepared
• BOM declares 2018 Australia's third-hottest year on record
• Adelaide now Australia's hottest capital city on record as temperatures soar
• Qld To Cop Dramatic Rise In Extreme Heat
• Australia Breaks Weather Records With Hottest Ever Summer
• 'The Darling Will Die': Scientists Say Mass Fish Kill Due To Over-Extraction And Drought
• Floods, Fire And Drought: Australia, A Country In The Grip Of Extreme Weather Bingo
• Australia Swelters Through Hottest Month On Record, With January Mean Temperature Exceeding 30c
• Fish Kill In The Murrumbidgee River Leaves 'Thousands' More Dead
• Thousands Of Australian Animals Die In Unprecedented Heatwave

Coal And Gas On Notice, As US Big Solar And Battery Deal Stuns Market

RenewEconomy - Sophie Vorrath

 Downtown Los Angeles at night. Source: Flickr

A Californian solar and battery storage power purchase agreement is plumbing new lows for the cost of electricity from solar – a US-dollar price of 1.99c/kWh for 400MW of PV and 1.3c/kWh for stored solar power from a co-located 400MW/800MWh battery storage system.
The record setting deal, struck by a team at the Los Angeles Department of Water and Power (LADWP) with renewables developer 8minute, seeks to lock-in a two-stage, 25-year contract to serve 7 per cent of L.A.’s electricity demand from the massive solar and battery project.
The project, called the Eland Solar and Storage Center, would be built in two 200MW stages in Kern County north of Los Angeles, with an option to add a further 50MW/200 MWh of energy storage for 0.665 cents per kWh more.

The project aims not only to help power L.A. during the day with dirt-cheap solar power but to use the stored battery power in the evening peak period to ease the effect of fossil fuel “ramping” as the solar leaves the system.
And while the project’s size is impressive – particularly the size of the battery system, which would be twice the size of the world’s current biggest big battery, Australia’s own Hornsdale Power Reserve – it has been the prices quoted for the PPA that have really caught the market’s attention.

Goodnight #naturalgas, goodnight #coal, goodnight #nuclear#LosAngeles seeks record setting solar PV price under 2¢/kWh and battery storage at 1.3¢/kWh under a 25-year contract https://t.co/KkwOqGyfWK¢-kwh/ @pvmagazine @howarth_cornell @ProfStrachan @ProfRayWills @NickCowern

— Mark Z. Jacobson (@mzjacobson) June 28, 2019

As PV Magazine’s John Weaver noted, the current world record solar power price was set in Mexico at 1.97¢/kWh as part of a batch of projects averaging just over 2¢/kWh. A lower bid submitted in Saudi Arabia at 1.79¢/kWh was not ultimately signed.
“This is the lowest solar-photovoltaic price in the United States, and it is the largest and lowest-cost solar and high-capacity battery-storage project in the U.S., and we believe in the world today,” said the LADWP’s manager for strategic initiatives, said James Barner. “So this is, I believe, truly revolutionary in the industry.”
Barner has also noted that the project has been able to make “full use” of a “substantial” federal solar investment tax credit, which amounted to around 30 per cent “basically knocked off the capital cost of the project.”
According to reports, Barner told a June briefing on the project that net peak load in the evening would be offset by the Eland facility, to keep gas powered generation “not running at the full amount.”
“The battery can be dispatched differently, depending on the system need,” he said. “So you could run that four-hour battery over 16 hours at one-fourth of the output so that you can vary it over time. It’s not just fixed over four hours.
“The battery is able to take a portion of (the) solar from that facility …and then store it into the battery so that the facility can provide a constant output to the grid. It can turn this solar facility, which is not typically dispatchable, into a dispatchable type of facility.”
According to data from the U.S. Energy Information Agency, and quoted in Forbes, a natural-gas plant opening at the same time as the Eland facility would produce power at more than twice the price, or 4-4.3¢/kWh.
Presuming the power off-take contract is approved, the Eland project is expected start construction in 2022, with the first production expected in the first half of 2023, and a guaranteed commercial operation date of the last day of that year, PV Magazine reported.

Links

• Los Angeles seeks record setting solar power price under 2¢/kWh
• Sydney Opera House Turns To Wind And Solar, May Add Battery For Perfect Match
• Australian Musicians Band Together To Invest In Solar Farms
• Australia To Achieve 50% Renewables By 2030 Without Government Intervention, Analysis Finds
• Life After Solving Climate Change: Not Mud Huts And Gruel But Clean Air And Warm Homes
• Jump In Renewable Energy Jobs As Solar Farms Overtake Hydro Power
• Four Corners Report Shows Climate Change Concerns Heating Up Ahead Of Federal Election
• Australia Has Enough Solar, Wind Storage In Pipeline To Go 100% Renewables
• 'Everyone Loves Solar': Climate Action Heats Up As NSW Election Issue
• Poorer Households Switching To Solar Faster Than The Rich

Moody’s Analytics Says Climate Change Could Cost US$69 Trillion By 2100

Washington Post - Steven Mufson

Environmental activists demonstrate during a Extinction Rebellion protest April 17 in London. (Henry Nicholls/Reuters)

The consulting firm Moody’s Analytics says climate change could inflict $69 trillion in damage on the global economy by the year 2100, assuming that warming hits the two-degree Celsius threshold widely seen as the limit to stem its most dire effects.
Moody’s says in a new climate change report that warming of 1.5 degrees Celsius, or 2.7 degrees Fahrenheit, increasingly seen by scientists as a climate-stabilizing limit, would still cause $54 trillion in damages by the end of the century.
The firm warns that passing the two-degree threshold “could hit tipping points for even larger and irreversible warming feedback loops such as permanent summer ice melt in the Arctic Ocean.”
The new report predicts that rising temperatures will “universally hurt worker health and productivity” and that more frequent extreme weather events “will increasingly disrupt and damage critical infrastructure and property.”
Moody’s Analytics chief economist Mark Zandi said that the report was “the first stab at trying to quantify what the macroeconomic consequences might be” of climate change, written in response to European commercial banks and central banks.
Climate change, Zandi said, is “not a cliff event. It’s not a shock to the economy. It’s more like a corrosive.” But, he added, it’s one that is “getting weightier with each passing year.”
Moody’s Investors Service, a major credit ratings agency, has already said that it wants to take climate into account when weighing the financial health of companies and municipalities.
The new report highlights the harm done to human health, labor productivity, crop yields and tourism.
It says that “water- and vector-borne diseases such as malaria and dengue fever will likely be the largest direct effect of changes in human health and the associated productivity loss.”
The report also says that rising temperatures will allow mosquitoes, ticks and fleas to move to new areas, resulting in more sick days. It would also raise public and private spending on health care.
Labor productivity will take a hit, especially among outdoor workers, including those working in agriculture.
The hardest-hit economies will be some of the fastest-growing ones — Brazil, Russia, India, China and South Africa, the report says.
The Moody’s Analytics report also forecasts lower oil and natural gas demand, dealing a blow to oil-exporting countries, especially in the Middle East. It forecasts that Saudi GDP will drop more than 10 percent by 2048; the kingdom would be the country harmed the most by climate change, hurting government revenue, Moody’s says.
Although Saudi Arabia has suffered drops in GDP when highly cyclical oil prices sink, Moody’s says that the kingdom would suffer more lasting harm as a result of climate change.
Of the 12 largest economies, India will be the worst hit, the report says, with GDP growing 2.5 percentage points more slowly than it would without the effects of climate change. The country’s service industry will be hit by heat stress, agricultural productivity will fall, and health-care costs will climb.
The firm carried out different scenarios using an international study by the World Bank, taking different locations into account and weighing different economic sectors. It said that rising sea levels would damage coastal real estate, wiping out rental incomes in some areas and thus cutting consumer spending.
But the scenarios only go through 2048. The Moody’s report says “the distress compounds over time and is far more severe in the second half of the century.”
“That’s why it is so hard to get people focused on this issue and get a comprehensive policy response,” Zandi said. “Business is focused on the next year, or five years out.”
He added: “Most of the models go out 30 years, but, really, the damage to the economy is in the next half-century, and we haven’t developed the tools to look out that far.”
Other businesses are peering ahead on climate change, too.
Chubb, one of the biggest insurance firms in the United States, on Monday said it would no longer sell insurance to new coal-fired power plants or sell new policies to companies that derive more than 30 percent of their revenue from the mining of coal used in power plants.
Although more than a dozen leading insurance companies in Europe have already cut off insurance for coal companies, U.S. firms have resisting pressure to take climate change into account.
Chubb’s step was just an initial one. “A major U.S. insurer like Chubb restricting insurance for coal projects and companies is a game-changer,” said Ross Hammond, a senior strategist for the Insure Our Future campaign, which has tried to pressure insurance companies to pull out of the coal market. But Hammond said that the company still needs to stop insuring new coal mines and the oil sands, or tar sands, in northern Alberta.
Lindsey Allen, executive director of Rainforest Action Network, said that “new coal projects cannot be built without insurance, and Chubb just dealt a blow to the dozens of companies that are still betting on the expansion of coal globally.”
Separately, the chief economist of Equinor, the Norwegian oil company previously known as Statoil, has written a report that looks at three scenarios for climate change and its impact on global economies, especially on energy.
Only one of those, the report said, would lead to a sustainable path, but that path comes with enormous challenges. To reach that set of targets by 2050, “almost all use of coal must be eradicated,” oil demand would need to be halved, and natural gas demand trimmed by more than 10 percent. Renewables as well as carbon capture and storage or utilization would have to increase sharply, helped by continuing advances in technology.
“In order to hit 1.5 degrees Celsius, the model to get there is enormously challenging,” said Eirik Waerness, senior vice president and chief economist of Equinor. He said more than half of new cars would have to be electric vehicles by 2030. Electricity demand will double, yet wind and solar would equal the entire current electricity output, a leap from current levels.
The threshold of 1.5 degree Celsius is the target set by most climate scientists for avoiding dire climate change.
Waerness also said that the company currently assumes a carbon price of $55 a ton when considering whether to finance new energy projects. As a result, Equinor has been investing more in projects such as offshore wind, where it can also tap into its experience with offshore platforms and technology.

Links

• The Economic Implications of Climate Change (pdf)
• More U.S. businesses making changes in response to climate concerns
• A climate change solution slowly gains ground
• In small towns across the nation, the death of a coal plant leaves an unmistakable void
• Norway's $US1 Trillion Sovereign Wealth Fund To Dump Billions In Coal Investments
• Australia's Clean Economy Future: Costs and Benefits
• Analysis: $130 Billion Per Year Benefit To Australia's GDP By Avoiding Climate Change
• The Next Reckoning: Capitalism And Climate Change
• Fed Official: Climate Change Is An ‘International Market Failure’
• Heavyweights Now Speaking With One Voice On Climate Change Risks
• Why Climate Change Risks Are 'Material' For Big Finance
• APRA Demands Banks, Insurers Act On Climate Risk
• The RBA Has Sounded The Climate Change Alarm. Time To Sit Up And Take Notice
• 'Change Now Or Pay Later': RBA's Stark Warning On Climate Change
• Climate And Economic Risks 'Threaten 2008-Style Systemic Collapse'
• The Economics Of Climate Change

Journey To Antarctica: What Scientists Think Of Trump’s Latest Climate Tweet

Rolling Stone - Jeff Goodell*

Photos: Nicholas Kamm/AFP/Getty Images; Derek Oyen/Unsplash

To scientists in Antarctica, President Trump is weirder than a sea pig.
On Tuesday, Trump tweeted a quote from Patrick Moore, a well-known climate denier who claims to have been a co-founder of Greenpeace. (He wasn’t, and Greenpeace has disavowed him as a “paid lobbyist.”)
“The whole climate crisis is not only Fake News, it’s Fake Science,” Trump quoted Moore as saying on an episode of Fox & Friends.
A day later, I asked Rob Larter, the chief scientist aboard the Nathaniel B. Palmer, where we have spent the past six weeks in Antarctica doing Real Science, what he thought of Trump’s tweet. Larter can talk about the movement of the Earth’s continents 500 million years ago as breezily as other men talk about off-season baseball trades. And of course out here in Antarctica, Larter had been far too busy during the past 24 hours actually contributing to the sum of human knowledge to pay attention to tweets from the conspiracy theorist in the Oval Office.
I showed Trump’s tweet to Larter on my iPhone. As he read it, he smiled slightly and shook his head. “It’s crazy talk,” said Larter, who is British. “Do any Americans really believe that stuff?”

Patrick Moore, co-founder of Greenpeace: “The whole climate crisis is not only Fake News, it’s Fake Science. There is no climate crisis, there’s weather and climate all around the world, and in fact carbon dioxide is the main building block of all life.” @foxandfriends Wow!

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) March 12, 2019

The 55 scientists and crew members from around the world who are aboard the Palmer with me have been living in a Trump-free paradise for weeks. We get very little news, as we are bandwidth-starved and have only intermittent connection to the outside world via internet and satellite phone.
But I’ll admit Trump’s tweet woke me up to a curious point: During this entire six-week cruise, I have lived in close quarters with my shipmates. I know what kind of cake was served at their kid’s birthday party and their views about the afterlife and why they believe that physicists who research the existence of other dimensions are likely to be crackpots. But there has been very little talk of climate politics or climate policy. The subject of Trump’s re-election comes up, and the Brits talk a lot about the disaster known as Brexit. There is much debate about internal politics at various universities, and within the National Science Foundation and the UK’s National Environment Research Council, both of which are funding this trip, which is part of a five-year-long collaboration to better understand the risks of collapse of Thwaites glacier in West Antarctica.
But as far as I can tell, the words “Green New Deal” have not been uttered on the ship by a scientist, nor have the words “carbon footprint” or “Paris climate accords.” I overheard one scientist engaged in a not-particularly-well-informed debate with the captain about the pros and cons of wind power, but that has been about it.
It’s not entirely surprising. “You don’t bring up climate politics because you have to live with people on the ship in very close quarters for seven weeks,” says Lars Boehme, an oceanographer from University of St. Andrews who has successfully tagged 11 seals on the trip. “It’s divisive.” Bastien Queste, a researcher from the University of East Anglia in the UK, has a different view: “Why talk about climate politics? We all have similar views on the ship. We all are big supporters of clean energy. We all know we have to get off fossil fuels. What is there to discuss?”
But even off the ship, the reluctance to get involved in politics persists. So far as I can tell, none of the scientists on this trip are engaged in climate-related political activism in their daily lives. Few are even comfortable talking about it. Several started squirming as soon as I brought it up. Two of the youngest researchers on the trip, one from the U.S. and one from Sweden, told me they have actually quit climate activism in recent years simply because they have no time.
Building a career in science is a brutally competitive endeavor, sucking up all your time and energy. But for many, the real problem with climate activism is that it requires dealing with the media. And if there is one thing that spooks climate scientists more than collapsing glaciers, it’s a person with a microphone. It’s not hard to see why. Scientists deal with facts, not characters or emotions.
They often see journalists as ignorant about science and all too eager to transform scientific debates into a new front in the culture wars. And they are not always wrong about that. “To be good at communicating about science, you have to spend a lot of time at it,” explains Queste. “If you try to analyze data and communicate with the public, it’s nearly impossible to find the time to do both very well.”
There is also the fear that if they are outspoken, they might be seen as too “political” and not do as well with research grants or other funding. That’s not a trivial question these days, when science budgets are slashed and tenured positions at universities are increasingly difficult to secure. It’s much easier just to keep your head down and do the work. “I am paid to do science,” one U.S. scientist on the trip told me. “So I do science.”
Others worry about offending family and friends by speaking out too bluntly. One scientist talked about a friend who published a paper on climate change in Nature, a top scientific journal, then received threats online. “This is a dangerous time to be a climate scientist,” the scientist said. And if the reaction of researchers on the Palmer is any indication, American scientists feel that danger more viscerally than most (and, not surprisingly, were more reluctant to talk on the record for this dispatch).
But to some U.S. scientists, it’s also a dangerous time to keep silent. From the Palmer, I emailed Andrea Dutton, a highly-regarded geologist at the University of Florida, about her reaction to Trump’s tweet. “This is no longer a matter of simple misrepresentation,” she wrote. “It is dangerous and reckless for our leaders to mislead the American people about the impacts of global warming. As a scientist, and perhaps more importantly, as a citizen of the U.S., I do feel that I have a moral obligation to speak out against misinformation. The American people deserve the truth about their future.”
One thing that has become very clear on this journey to Antarctica is that climate science is risky in all kinds of ways — including risks to life and limb. On the ship, instruments are dropped into the sea in the middle of the night while the deck of the ship pitches wildly in rough seas; winches spin with cables attached to 700-pound coring devices; marine technicians launch Zodiac boats in rough seas. On the Palmer, science goes on 24/7, no matter how bad the weather, no matter how exhausted you are.
Queste has been in the middle of most of it. When I sat down with him in the mess hall yesterday, he looked more tired than most. I asked him if he had seen Trump’s tweet. He hadn’t. So I showed it to him. “I can’t handle this much crap,” he moaned, his face drained from long hours in the lab. “It depresses me. Such blatant pandering and shit-stirring.”
A few minutes later, I showed Trump’s tweet to Lars Boehme, who seized onto a line in the tweet about carbon dioxide being “one of the main building blocks of life.” It’s a well-worn talking point for climate deniers. “You like carbon dioxide so much?” Boehme mused. “Try putting a plastic bag over your head and see how that works out.”
But perhaps the best response to Trump’s tweet came from Anna Wåhlin, a professor of physical oceanography at the University of Gothenburg and leader of the team that sent the Hugin, a semi-intelligent underwater research device, 1,500 feet beneath Thwaites glacier.
It was one of the most remarkable scientific achievements of the trip, and the data the Hugin collected has already helped scientists understand how ocean currents circulate in West Antarctica, pushing warm water beneath Thwaites and melting it from below. This is what science is supposed to do — go underneath our everyday world and make the unknown known.
Late Wednesday night, the lab on the Palmer boomed with the sound of the ship’s hull busting through thick sea ice. I asked Wåhlin if she’d seen Trump’s tweet. “No, I have not,” she replied.
She read it on my iPhone, then looked at me with something beyond anger or disgust. “I’m sorry,” she said.

* This is the latest dispatch in a series from Jeff Goodell, who is aboard the Nathaniel B. Palmer in Antarctica, investigating the effect of climate change on Thwaites glacier.

Links

• Journey to Antarctica: What We Learned in the Ice
• Journey to Antarctica: Is This What a Climate Catastrophe Looks Like in Real Time?
• Journey to Antarctica: The Dark Art of Coring
• Journey to Antarctica: Icy Subterranean Homesick Blues
• Journey to Antarctica: Mapping Thwaites
• Journey to Antarctica: Face-to-Face With the Doomsday Glacier
• Journey to Antarctica: Reckoning With Uncertainty
• Journey to Antarctica: When the Best Laid Plans Go Awry
• Journey to Antarctica: An Emergency at Sea